Proton: A Tale of Consistent Growth
BACKGROUND
- Founded in 2014, Proton’s mission is to build a better internet where privacy is the default. Proton appointed Addesu in May 2024 to help drive growth through smart paid media campaigns. Over the period, the business has seen significant growth across a range of products, underpinned by a great relationship between our teams.
- Seeking faster growth, Proton appointed Addesu to help them efficiently scale their paid media investment and successfully launch new services into the market. Operating alongside larger market competitors, scaling spend effectively was hindered by a complete lack of first-party data due to strict user data privacy policies. This tracking limitation made it difficult to drive enough rich data toward bidding algorithms.
- The problem was further complicated by having to configure separate conversion points to differentiate new B2B activity from consumer traffic, alongside running messaging experiments for products like Drive and Pass where the consumer use case is less clear. Finally, the account had to remain agile enough to immediately scale and capitalise on sudden spikes in demand, particularly when regional bans on adult sites and TikTok drove rapid upticks in VPN use.
OBJECTIVES
-
Efficiently scale spend to drive better performance for their VPN product.
-
Successfully launch new services into the market that quickly become strong revenue streams.
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Build a smart working environment that allows us to act quickly, taking advantage of market movements.
SOLUTION
- Working closely with the Proton team to respect user privacy, we overcame tracking limitations, pivoting to privacy-compliant lifetime value (LTV) conversion events. This fed rich, aggregated signals directly into the bidding algorithms, ensuring privacy remained respected whilst allowing us to deploy highly efficient tROAS bidding strategies instead of guessing conversion costs.
- To drive further growth, we launched localised ads across 15 languages into 215 regions, outperforming English benchmarks to deliver a massive performance uplift. We also configured separate landing pages and user journeys to profitably launch their new B2B activity away from consumer traffic.
- Finally, we built custom management automations and day-to-day alerts to catch issues before they arose. This highly responsive environment gave us the agility to instantly capitalise on sudden regional spikes in demand, turning localised content bans into immediate scalable revenue.
“From the start, Addesu has been an invaluable strategic ally. Their transparency, exemplary service levels, proactive approach and commitment to delivering results have been instrumental in unlocking substantial growth for us.”
Sarah Coppe, Performance Marketing Lead at Proton
IMPACT
Increase in conversion actions for VPN product
11.6
x
Increase in conversions for Mail product
x
Reduction in cost for VPN
%
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Proton: A Tale of Consistent Growth
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